AMD loses sense of humour

It’s April Fool’s day, which for us means that we have to automatically filter out anything that looks like it may be genuinely interesting, as it’s almost certainly a scarlet-coloured herring. However, one particular prank from a tech site has seriously ruffled AMD’s feathers, and prompted demands to get it removed.

The prank in question is AMD Zone’s Bulldozer benchmarks, which we have to say is a tremendous piece of effort. With eleven pages, and plenty of mocked-up benchmark results, you’d be forgiven for thinking that this isn’t a prank at all. In fact, it appears to be so real that AMD has demanded that the piece is taken down immediately.

AMD’s director of product marketing for servers and workstations, John Fruehe, lashed out at the piece in the comments section, saying “This is TOTALLY uncool. I could lose my job over this prank.” Given the way that misinformation spreads around the Web like wildfire, Fruehe presumably thought that people around the world might think the piece was genuine.

Feeling that the seriousness of the situation clearly warranted the use of the Caps Lock key, Fruehe exclaimed “TAKE THIS THING DOWN NOW, DO NOT SPREAD IT.” He also added, “I don't know who had this idea, but this is not good.” It doesn’t help that the piece specifically thanks “John Fruehe for setting us up with the system and to anyone else I forgot.”

There’s an important lesson here, folks. If you’re going to do an April Fool’s day joke, then make sure you strike the right balance between realism and comedy if you want to avoid upsetting people.

We’ll be posting a round-up of the best of today’s pranks, so keep your eyes peeled on the homepage throughout the day.